The Room With the Tassels

Carolyn Wells' The Room with the Tassels begins as a playful invitation to a genuine haunted-house adventure and quickly turns into a tightly wound detective mystery. When Wynne Landon insists on finding a real ghost story for a month-long country gathering, the search leads to Black Aspens, the decaying Montgomery mansion in Vermont, a lonely estate of nearly forty rooms with a long reputation for eerie happenings. The would-be guests approach the retreat with mixed motives—curiosity, skepticism, rivalry, and romance—while Norma Cameron, Eve Carnforth, Vernie, Milly, and the men around them reveal a lively, combustible mix of personalities. But the supposed supernatural puzzle soon darkens. Strange events culminate in Vernie's shocking disappearance, and Pennington Wise begins stripping away the ghostly façade. A hidden revolving column explains how someone moved through the house unseen, and the old "haunting" is exposed as a staged trick. Yet the real horror is murder: Wise's investigation uncovers Vernie Reid's body in the lake, weighted with bricks, and a physician confirms poison as the cause of death, linking the crime to a second fatality and a carefully planned deception. Atmosphere, wit, and suspicion drive this classic mystery toward a chilling human solution. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.